A Swamp of Fear and Loathing

"The trouble is that he had such a small ... intellect."

Listening to - Heaven and Earth - Jah Wobble


We watched a couple of the episodes of A Very Peculiar Practice that I taped from BBC 4 over Christmas. The book of the same name had a gimmicky insert at the start of each chapter in which the writer of the TV series (a guy called Rust rather than Andrew Davies who actually wrote both book and screenplay) talks to the (real) producer of the TV show. Yes! Confusing isn't it. Well it worked in the book but it is good that this device was not carried over to TV. It struck me last night that AVPP was actually quite gimmick free and I was trying to work out whether this was a feature of such drama at the time or just a refreshing reaction to the need to keep people's attention. There were many pauses which today would be filled with music which would then bleed into the dialog and make it inaudible. I know it seems that TV drama these days is a lot more sophisticated but in a lot of cases this is because the production values vis-à-vis the visuals, the picture composition, the lighting etc are so much higher. For a lot of people I think this makes something better than the writing would suggest. Now is this wonderful visual style done in order to paper over the cracks in the writing or is the writing so much worse because the writers know they cannot compete with the rinky-dinky little camera tricks?

For years I have periodically employed the phrase "rinky-dinky-little" as an adjective for many things and yesterday I realised that I had nicked the phrase from Bob - Sorry! Robert Buzzard in AVPP. I like to think it was an ironic theft rather than a subconscious admiration for the monster that was Dr. Buzzard. Maybe my understanding of irony was at American levels when I stole it.

A Very Peculiar Practice seems to have brought attention to many of the ludicrous attitudes and actions of people which at the time of transmission were probably under the radar for the general public but which now are part of everything from business to government. It was a sort of Catch-22 for academia though Heller has updated Catch 22 for a business situation.